Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (8 page)

“Yes,” she said. “I'll marry you.”

Green slid back into the booth and picked up his fork. “We're getting married.” He looked for someone to tell the news to, but there were only two other people in the diner, and the waitress was sitting in the back corner working a crossword puzzle.

Mary took a bite of her scrambled eggs.

“Jesus, I have a headache,” Green said. “You have any aspirin?”

“I think so.” She dug in her purse and came up with a bottle of Tylenol.

“So, you wanna get married tonight?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“This is great. Just great. I know just the right place.”

Mary smiled. “So what do you do? For work. I feel like I don't even really know you.”

Green thought about telling her about the bank. That would be a change. Honesty. But, in the end, he went in the direction he'd been going for the last few months. “I'm a bookie.”

“A bookie?”

“Sports bets. A lot of basketball. College. Pro. You know . . . ”

“A bookie in Las Vegas? Isn't that . . . redundant?”

“Redundant?”

“Unnecessary, I guess, is a better word.”

Green took a sip of his coffee, then motioned to the suit he was wearing. “I got the clothes to prove it, if you don't believe me.”

Since the day he had driven back to the Airstream after burying Jane, Green's plan had been to find a woman, marry her, then ride east into the smack-dab center of Illinois: Peoria. At work one afternoon, he had overheard a young couple, both of them wearing a gleeful look on their faces like they had just gotten to the front of the line to ride the roller coaster, say to a teller, “We just moved here from Peoria.” Green stopped doing what he was doing, which was entering some numbers into a ledger, longhand. He liked the word, Peoria. It rolled off the tongue. It sounded sung. A church choir could do something incredible with the word. Peeeee-or-i-aaaaaaaa. In a place like Peoria, he wouldn't have to remember watching his wife vomit into a bucket. The sun always shone in Peoria. The grass was green, the greenest of any place,
and the wind whistled zip-a-dee-doo-dah through the trees. Everyone had a skip in their step. Gas was cheap. Green knew nothing about the place, actually, but he longed for it, dreamed about it. He did some research. Peoria—a city named after the Peoria Indian tribe, who were mound builders. He liked mounds. Mounds of blankets in the middle of a bed. A mound of mashed potatoes on a plate. Mounds were not cancer. Peoria. It was on the Illinois River. He liked rivers, boats, anything having to do with water. Peoria had also been a vaudeville stop in the early 1900s:
If it'll play in Peoria
. . . He loved to laugh. There was a college there—Bradley, the Bradley Braves. They had streets lined with houses, a minor league baseball team—the Peoria Chiefs. He liked baseball. He'd get season tickets. He imagined the pace of life was slower, the good life, flatland, cornfields stretching out to the horizon. Chain restaurants. Parking lots and strip malls. He loved those. Chili's and Bennigan's. The Gap. Starbucks. The people were probably so nice they blushed when you took the Lord's name in vain. He had daydreamed about Peoria, without actually knowing he was daydreaming about Peoria, about meeting a woman and taking her there, and it was happening, had already happened, and he was ready to leave all of this—Las Vegas, Jane, cancer, all of it—so he could go to this better place, Peeeee-or-i-aaaaaaaa.

“If it'll play in Peoria, it'll play anywhere,” he told Mary.

She was floating in the pool. It was a Sunday afternoon, and they'd been married exactly eighty-seven hours.

“Did you hear me?” Green was shirtless, sitting under the shade of a deck umbrella, a blob of white sunscreen on his nose. He wore the sporty sunglasses.

“Yeah OK. Let's move to Peoria.”

“Really?”

“Where's it at? Indiana?”

“Illinois.”

“Oh, Chicago.”

“South of there. Middle of the state.”

“Fine,” she said. She mouthed the word, “Peoria.” It sounded exotic.

A week later, they hitched a U-Haul trailer to the minivan and drove out of Las Vegas, through the Rocky Mountains, across Kansas and the high plains, through Missouri, and over the Mississippi into Illinois. At six in the evening, they cruised into Peoria and found Holt Street, in a part of town called the Greek Isle. When they pulled up to the house Green had rented, Mary's mouth dropped open. The place was nothing more than a brick bungalow, even smaller than the Airstream. One of the front windows was busted out, a piece of plywood the temporary (or permanent?) fix. The bushes up by the house were overgrown, and the walk leading to the front door was cracked, with weeds sprouting through the uneven concrete. There wasn't a porch, just a few concrete steps leading to the front door. There wasn't a storm door, just a smudged white door with a mail slot. Mary looked over at Green, who had this big, just-won-the-lottery grin on his face. “My gosh, isn't it great to be getting a fresh start?”

The place came “lightly furnished,” which meant there was a well-worn couch in the living room. One side of the couch had obviously been a scratching post for a previous owner's cat. In fact, the smell of cat urine hung like an invisible fog throughout the house. There was an ancient double bed in the bedroom with a depression in the middle of the mattress that looked like it could hold water. Probably the most makeshift aspect of the house was the plastic patio furniture, a round white table and two white deck chairs, in the eat-in kitchen. When Mary saw that, she nearly burst into tears. Green said maybe they could put a vase with fresh-cut flowers on the table to spruce things up. Then Mary opened the fridge. Inside, there was a bottle of Heinz with crusted ketchup caked around the cap, ajar of pickles with two spears left, and a box of baking soda. Green smiled at her. “It's only temporary,” he said. “Just a place for us to get started.”

The plan was for Mary to make a little money while Green established himself as the man to see in Peoria if someone wanted to place a sports bet. Reluctantly, she filled out an application at the Pair-a-Dice, a riverboat casino docked on the East Peoria side of the Illinois River. Because of her Las Vegas experience, she was hired on the spot. The Pair-a-Dice was modeled after an Old West saloon. There were three mahogany bars, and the bartenders behind them dressed up in arm garters and suspenders. Different sections of the game floor had been given Old West names like the OK Corral, Dodge City, and Ghost Town. The place was stuffed to the gills with elderly people from nursing homes in neighboring central Illinois farm towns. Mary had never seen so many men in flannel shirts. The women had that bye-bye-Betty jiggle under their arms, and each time one reached up to pull the slot handle, the bye-bye-Betty jiggle-jaggled and made Mary feel sick right down to the bottom of her stomach. She was only ten years younger than these women—and Green was only a handful of years younger than the men.

She felt ridiculous in the waitress uniform she had to wear, a low-cut, madam-of-the-night costume complete with fishnet stockings which made her feel as if she'd fallen off a New Orleans parade float. She spent most of her shifts by an ATM in the corner pulling the skirt down to cover her butt and wobbling on stilettos that trembled under her weight of 225 pounds.
If it'll play in Peoria
. She hoped that someone, God maybe, was standing in the wings with a cane about to pull them off stage.

Peoria wasn't all that it was cracked up to be for Green, either. He put on a proud face for Mary, but he was already having some serious second thoughts. The sun certainly didn't always shine like he had imagined it would. In the six days they had been in Peoria, it had rained for five. He hated the rain, but as far as he could tell, the people of Peoria were fine with it, saying things like, “The plants are getting a good drink,” or, “It sure is going to green up around here.” But the worst part, the absolute
worst part about Peoria, was that Green was having a hard time getting his gambling enterprise going. Sure, it had sounded good to tell Mary he was a bookie, but in reality, he had no idea how to collect a bet or “advertise” that he was collecting them. He'd bought an accounting ledger, which he kept under the front seat in the minivan, but other than that, he hadn't a clue. Still, he kept at it. He knew that Mary wasn't going to put up with the house situation for too long, as she was the type of woman who wanted things—a tablecloth covering the table and more than just soap and shampoo in the shower. In fact, she was probably more of a bath person than a shower person.

He started with the farm towns surrounding Peoria. Each day, he would walk into their Main Street bars and order a drink, waiting, hoping, for something to happen. He tried to look like a bookie, the way he stood, with a look on his face that was meant to say,
I 'll take that bet
. The guys at the bar would gaze at him with sidelong glances, and, eventually, after they were comfortable, start talking to him, asking him questions, buying him drinks. A peculiar thing: these Midwesterners poured their bottles of Bud into small glasses. Green didn't understand this practice. How was he going to get these people to trust him with their money if they didn't even trust their bottles of beer? He had thought this was going to be easy, that he'd just have to walk into a bar, tell people he was from Las Vegas, and that would be that. Yes, they were impressed that he was from Vegas. They smiled and nodded their heads when he told them, giving him the look-over as they took in his suit. Then they would ask him if he worked for Caterpillar and had just gotten transferred to Peoria?

One day, Green went into a bar called Mike's Tap, on the south side of Pekin. It was eleven in the morning, and the place smelled like a locker room after it had been hosed down. The joint was empty except for the bartender drinking a mug of coffee and watching a morning talk show, and a guy sitting at a table reading the sports section of the
Peoria Journal Star
and drinking
a bottle of Bud out of a small glass. The guy looked like someone who drove a grain truck and spent his weekends hunting deer.

Green sat down across from him. “What's with the small glasses?” he asked. “I gotta know. Everyone around here does it. I don't get it.”

The guy looked over the top of his newspaper. “Do I know you?”

“No.”

“Should I know you?”

“I see you're reading the sports page.”

“Who told you about me?”

“No one. Why? Should someone have?”

“Do I know you?”

“Like I said, I don't think so.”

“Did Mike send you over to talk to me?” The guy nodded toward the bartender.

Green looked over his shoulder. “Yeah. Mike did.” He wanted to see where this was going.

“So, you wanna book a bet?”

“Wait a second. You're a bookie? I'm a bookie, too.”

“You're a bookie?” the guy asked.

“In the flesh.”

“You're not from around here, are you? You look tan.”

“Vegas.”

“So, you're a bookie from Las Vegas?”

“That's where I'm from. Yeah.”

“How many suits you own?”

Green was wearing a maroon suit that day with a white pocket square in the breast pocket, a paisley tie. “About eight.”

“They don't sell suits like that around here.”

“They probably do. Somewhere. I haven't really looked around, but I bet they probably do. There were a few stores in Vegas.”

“Rule number one. Drop the . . . ” He motioned to the suit. “You sell cars?”

“I'm a bookie. I told you. I used to work at a bank, though. I'm retired.”

“God does not see as you see. You judge by appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart.”

“That's from a movie isn't it?”

“Something like that.”

“So, you think the suit is too much.”

“The Lord looks into the heart. You judge by appearance.”

“What movie is that from?”

The guy rustled his paper. “I wanna get back to this article.”

Green got up and took a stool at the bar and ordered a vodka on the rocks. He squeezed some lemon into the clear liquid, followed by a couple of packets of sugar. He wasn't quite sure what to make of the exchange he had just had—“The Lord looks into the heart.” He had a headache, and gulped two Tylenol with his vodka.

Eventually, the guy got up from the table and put a Bonnie Raitt song on the jukebox, then went over to the pay phone to make a call. After he was finished with the call, he wrote something on a bar napkin, then stuffed it in his shirt pocket and sat down to do the crossword in the paper. Green watched him for a while, then ordered a cheeseburger. He offered to buy one for the guy, who declined Green's offer.